Jennifer Aniston gets anti-Rachel in We’re the Millers (WITH VIDEO)

NEW YORK — Jennifer Aniston might have discovered the secret formula for her film success post-Friends.

Think of the new movie strategy as the anti-Rachel approach.

She was exactly that as one of the Horrible Bosses in the 2011 comedy and managed to get laughs and some good reviews for her against-type effort.

Now, Aniston ups the ante by playing a stripper in the R-rated comedy We’re the Millers, and most preview audiences seem to enjoy her revealing anti-Rachel ways.

Opening on Aug. 7, the movie is subversive in more ways than Aniston’s portrayal. It opens with Jason Sudeikis’s middle class pot dealer Dave getting caught between a rock and a dead place when street toughs rip off his stash and his cash.

The circumstance prompts his supplier (Ed Helms) to make him an offer he better not refuse — smuggle a drug shipment from Mexico to the U. S. or else.

Desperate, Dave agrees then comes up with the idea of posing as the husband and father of a fake RV family on vacation.

After some haggling, he enlists his stripper neighbour Rose (Aniston), a homeless urchin Casey (Emma Roberts) and a virginal teen Kenny (Will Poulter) who is abandoned by his single parent. They must pretend they are all in the family — the Miller family — if they want to get paid.

Snappy patter, a few gunfights and lots of quasi-embarrassing situations arise, including a sequence when Aniston as Rose has to prove she’s a stripper to thugs at a greasy auto body shop.

“That was a challenging one for me, but I just had to do it,” said the 44-year-old during an interview at a Soho hotel. “They rolled the cameras and I just had to bite the bullet.”

“It was a little uncomfortable at first, but I got into it. I mean you do all the rehearsals alone and then you’re on set with three cameras and a bunch of crew, so it was a little intimidating at first.”

As usual, Aniston didn’t leave much to chance before she got there. She worked out tirelessly for weeks with a choreographer and trainer to make sure she made all the right private-dancer moves before filming even began.

She also cut back on her calorie intake as part of her preparation. It’s a special diet.

“It’s called no food,” said Aniston joking. “There was a lot of salad, a lot of celery sticks, a lot of cucumbers. And ice chips. They did let me eat ice chips.”

That’s not new for her but the anti-cute portrayals are. So far, the performances have been clicking compared to her recent roles in The Bounty Hunter and Just Go With It.

Mind you, it’s hard to get Rachel out of our heads after Aniston earned five consecutive Emmy nominations and one Emmy for her Friends character.

She doing her best to change things up with We’re the Millers. But despite the raunchy comedy antics in the film, Aniston did take her portrayal of Rose seriously.

“I think she’s a sad stripper who has built up this tough exterior from being disappointed many times throughout her life and making some bad choices with bad men,” said the actress.

And here’s her character’s backstory: “I thought of her maybe as a classical trained dancer at one point who maybe didn’t quite make it. I think her rage is sadness turned outward. To get into it, I pretended.”

Playing the cliched middle class mother and wife turned out to be easier than she expected, and that had more to do with what she was wearing than what she was thinking.

Finding the funny proved to be just as natural opposite Saturday Night Live’s Sudeikis. They had been in The Bounty Hunter and Horrible Bosses together previously, but the comedy base of We’re the Millers relies on their dysfunctional relationship.

It didn’t seem to be a problem for either of them, even though Aniston tends to prefer scripted comedy while Sudeikis improvises with the best of them.

“There wasn’t a lot of improv, so we mostly stuck to the script,” the actress said, but added that “there was some banter, which is a lot of fun. And (Sudeikis) is good at it. He’s an amazing partner in volleying.”

Able assistance in the laugh department arrives when Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman and Saturday Night Live alum Kathryn Hahn show up. They play the fun-loving, RV-driving Don and Edie Fitzgerald who try to befriend the Millers with some culture-clashing results.

In one scene, for example, Hahn’s Edie mistakenly believes Aniston’s Rose is coming on to her, which leads to some awkward fondling of Rose.

“All of it was completely 100 per cent comfortable and easy,” Aniston said smiling. “I wish it went on longer. I’m pretty easy.”

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